Positive Reviews For Nvidia' GeForce 6800 Ultra

Sander Sassen writes "Following months of heated discussion and rumors about the performance of Nvidia' new NV4x architecture, today their new graphics cards based on this architecture got an official introduction. Hardware Analysis posted their first looks at the new GeForce 6800 Ultra and takes it for a spin with all of the latest DirectX 9.0 game titles. The results speak for themselves, the GeForce 6800 Ultra is the new king of the hill, beating ATI's fastest by over 100% in almost every benchmark." Reader egarland adds "Revews are up on Firing Squad, Toms Hardware, Anandtech and Hot Hardware." Update: 04/14 16:54 GMT by T : Neophytus writes "HardOCP have their real life gameplay review available."

nvidia's back

[rwiedower]

These are the guys that managed to crush every single other player into the ground...the fact that nVidia was knocked backwards by ATI was a huge deal, but they weren't the champ for being slow on your feet. At the end of the next few months, the continuing battle should be good news for all of us consumers.

Did anyone else notice the size of the die rivals even that of the Pentium 4 EE? This thing is frickin' huge!

Power Requirements

[Lord_Pall]

Okay so it's fast.. no question.. Amazing feature set as well..

but it requires a 480 watt power supply

and 2 power connections... And it also has what looks to be a vacuum cleaner tied to it..

I currently use a shuttle skn41g2 for my main box.. I love the sff pc's. This won't work in that.. It would make the includied power supply very sad.

My HTPC box uses an antec sonata with a fanless radeon 9000, and ultra quiet everything else.. Forget using this in a quiet pc as well

I don't care for nvidia's trend towards hideously loud, bulky, power hungry video cards.. They might perform well, but for normal use, i'd prefer something smaller and quieter.. and for god's sake, give me an external power supply.. heh

the cards are still all very expensive

[junkymailbox]

Man .. There has been many generations of video cards now .. but the prices doesnt seem to come down that much ..

This is an excellent development

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great to see competition in this space -- to see a market with solid competitors duking it out. Now, if standards were a little more solid and stable, we'd get to see even more action and get even more benefit as consumers.

Re:nvidia's back

[YanceyAI]

And this is why healthy competition is GOOD for consumers (*nudges Bill Gates*).

Money

[tai_Dasher]

People who can afford to buy these kind of things should give money to charity.

No seriously, this thing costs more than a new full fledged computer.

Re:nvidia's back

[BiggerIsBetter]

To hell with the die size, check out the power requirements. There's two, TWO! power connectors for that thing. Damn, they've created a monster. I wonder how fast it can run GPGPU [gpgpu.org] apps...

"... by over 100% in almost every benchmark"??

[sczimme]

From the article:

To measure how well both cards perform with actual gameplay we used Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 and Halo and Far Cry. For both versions of Unreal Tournament we've used the built-in benchmark, which consists of a flyby and a botmatch. We've omitted the flyby scores as they doesn't tell us much about performance during actual gameplay, just how fast the graphics card is able to render the flyby. With UT2003 the lead the GeForce 6800 Ultra takes over the Radeon 9800 XT is less impressive, at a 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions it is only 6% faster. At 1600x1200 however the GeForce 6800 Ultra pulls away and clocks in 21% faster. With UT2004 the difference is much bigger, starting off at 10% at 1024x768 up to 65% faster at 1600x1200. What is also noteworthy is the fact that the performance of the Radeon 9800 XT drops at higher resolutions whereas that of the GeForce 6800 Ultra stays at about the same level.

I know this is /., but how does this become "beating ATI's fastest by over 100% in almost every benchmark"??

Re:the cards are still all very expensive

[Moofie]

I wonder if it has anything to do with the price the market will bear. Hmmm...

Re:Power Requirements

[happyfrogcow]

The sound of the fans should be drowned out by booming speakers you should have to go with your gaming system. games and gamers aren't quite, who cares about fan noise when your kicking someones ass?

Now power consumption... that can be an issue.

Talk about cornering the market ...

[hlygrail]

... but what am I going to have to PAY for this beautiful monster?

It's big (2 slots), it probably runs VERY VERY hot, takes two power connectors... but it seems to trump EVERYTHING else so far, and not by small amounts!

Fanboyism

[bonch]

I think the submitter must be something of an Nvidia fan. :) Most people wouldn't ridiculously compare a new next-gen card to today's months-old cards, not even mentioning that ATI has a new one due out in weeks. But he sure did mention an over 100% speed increase over those old cards, didn't he?

Personally I don't get the fanboy rivalries--I have a Radeon in my laptop and a Geforce in my desktop, and that's just what I happened to buy at the time, no fanboy adherism going on.

FX 6200?

[Spleener12]

I'm curious as to whether or not this means there will be a new low-end NVIDIA card. Yeah, the 6800 is nice, but I'm more interested in the cards that I can actually afford.

No more Quake bencmarks?!

[Cthefuture]

Ahh! When did Tom's do away with the Q3 benchmarks?

It's still the only game that can push the hardware to its limits reliably. All those other games tend to have bottlenecks that are algorithm/code related rather than hardware related (like the scripting engine in UT).

Too bad, I found Quake3 to be one of the most accurate because it ran at such a low level and could pretty push the hardware. It's not like those other games are using the hardware shaders yet anyway (or are they?).

I wish ....

[El Cubano]

I wish that people that pretend to be computer experts would do the teeniest bit of research.

How about this gem: First introduced in 1995, Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface (API) was designed to make life easier for developers by providing a standard platform for Windows-based PCs. Before the arrival of DirectX, developers had to program their software titles to take advantage of features found in individual hardware components. With the wealth of devices on the market, this could become a tedious, time-consuming process.

I'm glad he cleared that up for us. Because this little known company called SGI [sgi.com] didn't develop OpenGL [opengl.org] back in 1992 [sgi.com]. In fact, were it not for MS, we would still be in the computer graphics dark ages.

I'm not trying to troll here. I am just pissed that people pretend to be experts when they don't have a clues what they are talking about.

I sense a change in the force.....

[Selecter]

If Ati's counter offering, due up on the 26th it seems, has 90% of the performance of this beastie but has lower power requirements ( 1 molex or none ) and does not take up slots then Ati will still beat it.

There's a very limited number of gamers that will buy this card - you literally have to build a whole new PC around it considering the power requirements and the slot hoggishness. I wont be buying one. My 9500 Pro Oc'ed to 300/300 with a 3000+ AMD *STILL* plays anything without problems ( at least any I can see )

Even if ATi does come out with a card that beats it, I wont be buying one of those either. Gaming is only *part* of what I use computers for. These days at age 40 I cant compete with the twitchy youngsters anyways :D

I care a lot more these days about how well my data is protected and how good the whole experience is, not how many fps I get in some game.

Perhaps i'll be able to afford a 9800XT

[dj_paulgibbs]

Perhaps when these cards come out, i'll finally be able to afford a 9800XT (or similar Nvidia card - i'm an ATi guy).

Re:No more Quake bencmarks?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would counter that Quake3 is obsolete, because it sends all of the geometry it renders, across the AGP bus to the video card, every single frame. Modern games will not do this except for particle systems and other dynamic objects that can't be animated efficiently with a vertex shader.

There's already examples of this in real world games such as FarCry. For example, force the terrain in the game to not LOD at all. The polycount will go up by around a factor of 10, but the framerate will be unchanged.

Re:Power Requirements

[GoofyBoy]

>games and gamers aren't quite,

When you watch tv, turn on the radio to a low sound level.

Even if you have the tv up loud, its still annoying.

(Not to mention using the computer for non-gaming stuff)

Re:How is it the "King of the hill"?

[benh999]

The new top-of-the-line offering will always beat out the competitors' top-of-the-line offering. You can always say, "For all we know _____'s new offering will beat the new _____.

The point was that the new GeForce is at the top now.

Re:More info, pcis, and a different view

[Cyph]

Those benchmarks are leaked images from the HardOCP benchmark, for most part. If you look, you'll notice that HardOCP decided to do something unusual this time and not compare each card at the same performance settings, but rather, compare it in such a way that it shows the top performance setting the card could use while running at a similar fps count as the other cards. I personally am not really fond of the approach, because seeing everything at the same in-game performance setting makes it a lot easier to compare to other cards.

What are the recommended power supply brands?

[Zed2K]

So does nvidia recommend any power supply brands to be used with this card? I would think they would almost have to recommend something as the power usage requirements might scare a lot of people away from buying the card just because they don't think (or know) if the one they have will work.

Time to upgrade?

[ProppaT]

Maybe this'll force the price of all the other cards in the market down low enough to where I can soup up my computer on the cheap. Those 5900's are looking pretty nice right about now...

Re:No more Quake bencmarks?!

[LarsWestergren]

[Quake 3] is still the only game that can push the hardware to its limits reliably. All those other games tend to have bottlenecks that are algorithm/code related rather than hardware related (like the scripting engine in UT).

Yes, it is incredibly meaningful to see that card X can do 672 frames per second in Quake 3, and card Y can do 784 frames per second, even though your monitor can't show it that quickly or your eyes wouldn't see the difference if it could. When you can boast to your friends about numbers like that, who needs to know how the cards perform in modern games, the ones people actually choose to upgrade their cards for? ;-)

linux k2.6 driver on dual 64-bit opteron support?

[Maljin Jolt]

That's my question. I doubt the answer will ever be positive, so I am not interested.

Re:FX 6200?

[ameoba]

What counts as something you can 'actually afford'? If you don't plan on spending at least $100 on a graphics card, you're going to get shit (think Intel + Celeron). For right at $100 today, you can get a Radeon 9600 or a geForce FX 5700, current generation (DX9) cards that have very respectable performance. (for slighly less, GF4 Ti's and Radeon 8500/9100s are still available, giving you the last generation's high-end for cheap).

The current generation's low-end cards (as well as the last gen or two) aren't really worth the money if you want to do anything more complex than 3d screensavers. The FX5200 is a dog that isn't really any faster than the GF4mx was & isn't really worth using in DX9. The Radeon 9200 is actually slower than the 9100 & 9000. Eventually, the FX 6x00 core will be adapted to a chip that sucks just as much & you'd probably be better off getting a high to mid range card from the previous generation.

Intel makes a 3.4GHz P4EE and AMD has the Athlon64 FX-53, both of which are $800+ CPUs, you don't see (many) people complaining about the top of the line chips there being over twice the price of the chip 2 steps down ($275 should get you an Athlon64 3200+ or a P4 3.2GHz), yet when a new graphics card comes out and it's $500 every lines up to talk shit.

Yet there's always going to be something in the $100-150 range (what's considered reasonable mid-range for serious gaming) that's worth buying (barring some sort of hyper-inflation); you don't always have to have the latest & greatest thing on the market. Game manufacturers realize this and target their games to be playable on $50 cards, ideal for $100-150 cards and able to take advantage of the $500 cards.

PCI-Express

[mark_space2001]

Neat, but at this point I think I'm going to wait for PCI-E to become common on motherboards before I upgrade. Bandwidth is starting to be an issue with just regular PCI, I'd prefer to get something that isn't going to be just a throw away item in a few short months.

What's the point if no one can afford it?

[DroopyStonx]

A $600 card that requires a 480 watt power supply? Can you say "overkill"?

Something in that will have to be redesigned before people will consider buying it.

While some hardcore gamers wouldn't mind throwing that kinda cash at a vid card right now, most people won't. Of course, these cards are intended for general consumers once they get about a year old or in the $100-$299 price range, but the 480 watt power supply is like $20 extra per month on your electric bill if you're using it a lot!

That'll be quite a shocker when people figure out that their brand new video card is spiking their elec. bill.

Re:I sense a change in the force.....

[MrAngryForNoReason]

90% of the performance of this beastie but has lower power requirements ( 1 molex or none )

I very much doubt Ati's new card won't need any additional power. Don't forget Ati's 9700 Pro was the first card to require more power than the AGP slot provided.

... considering the power requirements and the slot hoggishness.

PCI slots aren't as useful as they used to be. So much is on board now so PCI cards aren't needed. Take the Asus A7N8X for instance, it has two network connectors on board as well as sound comparable to a high quality PCI sound card. And don't forget the slot you lose is the first one, which shares an IRQ with the AGP slot so it isn't a good idea to use it in any case.